It was the afternoon of Nov. 16, two weeks since Barbara Molland had suffered a life-threatening stroke. She and her husband of more than 50 years, Michael Molland, were on the living room couch, holding hands and talking about their future. Both were nearing 80, and they had a 234-acre ranch in the remote green pastures of western Sonoma County to take care of. Maybe it was time to downsize, they agreed.

That’s when they heard a man yelling gibberish outside. They’d left the gate open for a contractor they’d been expecting — maybe it was his son? But the yelling wouldn’t stop. After some time, Barbara asked Michael to see what was going on. That would be the last thing she ever said to him.

Within minutes, Michael would be dead at the hands of Adrian Yanez, a stranger in the throes of psychosis.

On Nov. 14, the day Barbara returned from the hospital, Yanez left his house in Fairfield. He told his parents, with whom he lived, that he was going to run an errand. But he was really heading to the Farmhouse Inn, a five-star hotel beside the Russian River in Forestville. 

When Yanez arrived at the hotel, staff were alarmed. The inn attracts some of Wine Country’s most elegant travelers, and he was far from posh. He wore boots and a construction shirt and repeatedly asked the staff if he could buy and smoke cigarettes on the property.

When Yanez hadn’t returned home or responded to calls by Friday morning, his family reported him missing to the Fairfield Police Department. An officer reported to the family that morning that Yanez’s silver Toyota Camry had been spotted near Windsor, not far from Forestville, in Sonoma County.

The family was worried he might hurt someone. Yanez was prone to bouts of mania. Over the preceding months, he had frequently behaved in a frightened and paranoid manner, they said. He often claimed the mafia was after him.

Staffers at the Farmhouse Inn said Yanez acted “disturbed” throughout his stay. He told a masseuse that “he couldn’t wait to feel her womanly hands on his back,” did Joaquin Phoenix’s stairs dance from ‘The Joker,” and drank out of all the alcohol bottles in his room. When he didn’t check out as expected on Nov. 15, staffers knocked on his door to confront him. He opened the door naked, sweating profusely.

The following morning, the day of the killing, Yanez told a waitress to sit next to him as he waited for breakfast at the hotel. She did, and he started scratching her back. She stood to leave, and he grabbed her wrist, forcing her to sit back down.

Hotel staff called 911. At 11:53 a.m., Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies approached Yanez, placing him in handcuffs and beginning a field examination for a potential 72-hour psychiatric hold.

At 12:22 p.m., Deputy Miguel Garcia reached Yanez’s sister Natalia to notify her of the situation, call records show. She had already been phoning hospitals and crisis centers to find her brother and was glad to hear he had been located.

Natalia pleaded for deputies to hold Yanez while their father drove 90 minutes from their home, or for them to take her brother to jail or a crisis center so he could get help. According to Natalia, Garcia said Yanez didn’t want to see his relatives, because they wanted him to go to a hospital.

Natalia said Garcia told her that even though he thought Yanez had been drinking and acting erratically, he had passed a sobriety test and answered all questions, so the deputies could not detain him.

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department has declined to release body-camera footage from the incident at the hotel, saying it is part of an ongoing investigation. Representatives of the department have been steadfast in their claim that there “was no legal reason” to detain Yanez. But legal experts dispute that, saying the deputies did have grounds to involuntarily commit him to a 72-hour involuntary mental health hold, known as a 5150.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act established this protocol in 1967, at a time when mental institutions were losing public support amid reports of routine and physical abuse. The 5150 was considered a more humane approach than immediate asylum incarceration.

Had the responding officers placed Yanez on a 72-hour hold, mental health professionals in a hospital or crisis center would have assessed him for illness. If they determined it necessary, he could have then been held for 14 days — a decision that could be challenged in court.

Police officers, mental healthcare workers, and paramedics have the freedom under law to determine what behavior crosses the threshold for a 5150 hold. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department says its field officers receive Crisis Intervention Training to guide people who are having mental health emergencies. Deputies must decide if the subject is gravely disabled or a threat to themselves or others. The deputies can take into consideration family testimony in assessing the person’s mental state.

If they weren’t sure what to do with Yanez, the deputies could have called Sonoma County’s 24/7 mobile crisis response team, which is staffed with mental health clinicians and drug counselors. They did not.

Deputies released Yanez next to his Toyota Camry, which was filled with new clothes and sunglasses from an apparent shopping spree, at 1:24 p.m. At 3:03 p.m., the Sheriff’s Department received a call about a screaming man in the countryside, at the Mollands’ ranch.

At the end of a bumpy, two-mile stretch of one-lane road sits a long driveway shaped like a cane. The house it leads to is invisible from the street. Hidden behind a line of trees, it’s a 40-minute drive from the Farmhouse Inn.

Yanez was lost, he later told Natalia, looking for a girl he knew who lived in the area. When he got to the property, he perceived that “bad things were happening.” He thought himself a David versus a Goliath.

Barbara was on the couch in the living room at the front of the house waiting for Michael to return when she heard smashing and glass breaking. She couldn’t see it, but Yanez had broken down the back door. She realized something serious was happening. When Michael returned to her line of vision, his back was to the front door and he was looking at his phone, calling their son Jake, who called 911.

Michael didn’t look at Barbara or step back into the living room, and he didn’t go upstairs to get their shotgun. If he had gone for the gun, Yanez might have followed him and spotted Barbara on the sofa.

Frozen on the sofa, Barbara could only follow their movements through the creaking of the floors. She heard Michael dart into the dining room, then the kitchen, to confront the intruder. More smashing. Then her phone rang — it was a sheriff’s deputy telling her to hide. She crawled to the floor, still attached to her catheter and walker. She heard someone go up and down the stairs twice. She waited. After a while, she heard a police radio. She looked up and saw a deputy. He told her to stand.

“Where is my husband?” Barbara asked. That’s when she learned that Michael was dead.

He had been bludgeoned to the head with a softball bat and died in the hallway between the kitchen and the front door. Deputies blocked Barbara from seeing Michael’s body. She didn’t want to see him anyway.

“I did not want to remember him that way. I wanted to remember him the way he was,” she later said. Barbara believes Michael intentionally led Yanez away from her to keep her safe. “He was protecting me.”

The Mollands’ daughter Maria was driving to visit her parents, with her children in the back seat, when she got a text from her brother Jake — and then a call — about a screaming man outside the house. When she drove up to the last turn before the property, she met a slew of speeding Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department cars. Her daughter was screaming too.

When she got to the gate, a neighbor offered to take her kids. In front of the house, Maria saw Yanez’s Camry, doors open and music blasting. A helicopter was overhead.

By the time Barbara and Michael’s son Ben arrived later that afternoon, there were deputies outside the gate checking everyone who came through. He parked his car in front of the house, where his mother was on a gurney outside an ambulance, Maria by her side. Jake was talking to detectives. The three siblings embraced and fell to the ground, weeping.

Long after the deputies left the property that evening, the Mollands remained confused about how this could have happened — who the man was, why he’d been there. 

The Sheriff’s Department has never communicated with the Mollands about Yanez’s whereabouts and behavior earlier that day, even though one deputy, Darin Braswell, was among those who responded at both the hotel and the ranch. The family learned that Yanez had been reported missing the day prior and detained at the inn only from reports in the Sebastopol Times. Only after those stories were published did the Sheriff’s Department update public statements to include information about the incident at the inn. The Molland family says deputies told them not to read the news.

More than an hour after the killing, the Yanez family received a call from Sonoma County Sheriff’s Sergeant Ryan Mitchell. He asked Natalia why her brother had been reported missing and why he might have been in western Sonoma County. Natalia explained her brother’s strange behavior and noted that she had spoken to a deputy earlier that afternoon, when Yanez was escorted out of the Farmhouse Inn.

Natalia was glad that deputies had caught up to him, hoping he had gotten into a scuffle or some other minor offense. Maybe he was going to get help now, she thought.

That night, Mitchell called again. He was on his way to Fairfield to search Yanez’s bedroom. When Natalia and her husband arrived at her parents’ house, four plainclothes officers said her brother had killed someone. They were stunned.

“This is what we wanted to avoid,” Natalia recalled thinking. “That’s why we wanted him to get help.”

Two days after the killing, Mitchell called Natalia again with an update: Her brother remained in the midst of a manic episode. He was held in a padded cell in the mental health unit of the jail and was being checked every 15 minutes.

At his arraignment nine days after the killing, Yanez appeared in a wheelchair. He stared into the middle distance, seemingly unaware of the seriousness of the situation. As he looked toward the ceiling, his family cried uncontrollably from the seats behind him. It was the first time they had seen him since he went missing.

Yanez was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, medicated, and deemed fit to stand trial. A Jehovah’s Witness, he often prays in his jail cell. Natalia said he wishes he had gotten help for his mental illness sooner.

His public defender, Susan Israel, predicts that the trial will not begin for several months.

“There’s clearly some mental health issues that we need to explore,” Israel said. “That entire day just doesn’t make sense, and we need to figure out what happened.”

The Mollands are also hoping to understand what happened that day. They want to achieve justice for Michael’s death by changing the way mental health crises are handled moving forward.

Barbara is pursuing a lawsuit against the county and sheriff’s department, alleging that deputies failed in their duty to care for Yanez and the public at large by neglecting to summon medical care or hold him until his family arrived. The suit claims that deputies aggravated Yanez during the encounter at the hotel, contributing to his deteriorating mental state and causing Michael’s death.

“The deputies violated the Sheriff’s Department’s internal de-escalation policies and procedures by adopting stances and tactics that were interpreted by Yanez as aggressive, including placing their hands on their weapons and handcuffing him, cornering him as they interrogated him, and using threats to obtain his compliance, including words to the effect of ‘If you come back here, you’ll be arrested,’” the lawsuit alleges. “Deputies were aware that Yanez posed a foreseeable threat of violence to those with whom he might come into contact and failed to act with reasonable care in response.”

Barbara chose to file the lawsuit “because I don’t want this happening to another family ever,” she said. “It’s too painful. How does this happen in today’s world, you know, that someone like Yanez is driving around?”

Rob Wipond, a writer who researches psychiatric detentions, is concerned about people who are improperly held under 5150s. He said in some places, officers overuse psychiatric detention not just to avert potentially dangerous situations but to manage schoolchildren and the elderly or to quell family conflicts.

But in the case of Yanez, said Wipond, a psychiatric hold would have been appropriate. “It is unclear … if these police officers actually know the current law in California,” he said.

Placing someone under any kind of involuntary commitment is a serious restriction on freedom and should always be approached with care and recognition of civil rights, says attorney Jerry Threet, who established Sonoma County’s Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach and served as director until 2019. But he is skeptical that Yanez would not have qualified for a 72-hour hold under Sonoma County’s standards. 

“I have reviewed a fair number of incidents involving a 5150 evaluation, and the deputies used a higher standard to evaluate Yanez than many other officers,” said Threet.

There has been movement away from 5150 holds in local jurisdictions, a sign of  more social sensitivity to how law enforcement engages with those suffering from mental illness.

In San Francisco, there were 2,851 psychiatric detentions at the city’s main public hospital from July 2020 through June 2021. In 2023-24, detentions fell by 35%.

In 2019, Santa Rosa police officers authorized 626 holds. In 2024, that number was 251. 

In 2024, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department and contracted police departments authorized 234 psychiatric detentions — the fewest of any year in the past two decades.

Late in his life, Michael gave Barbara a book of poems. She had that book in the passenger seat of her car as she returned to the ranch in May, six months after she became a widow. There was work being done on the property in preparation for its sale, and she was there to tell the workers the location of a pipe that only she knew. 

She didn’t want to be there, she said. The buildings were empty, and all the cars belonged to strangers. It was a physical representation of the void of Michael.

“Our whole existence together was like a dream,” Barbara said of their 60-year relationship. They’d met in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin — he the principal’s son and a football player; she the homecoming queen — before moving to California, where they lived in an artist commune in the Sierras as Michael earned conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War. They got married in Montana, and returned to California to raise a family. Michael worked various jobs for little pay before enrolling in law school at night and becoming a partner at one of San Francisco’s top firms.

He was a man of few words when you first met him, taking time to assess the character of everyone he met. He was talented at resolving conflicts with empathy and conversation, at work and in the home.

“He was a truly good person in a difficult world,” Barbara said.

The move to the ranch when their youngest kid was off to college was an homage to their deep love of nature. Their children felt it was Michael’s version of religion. As Barbara bred horses, he built up the property with his hands, often walking around early in the morning with dirt in his fingernails. He thought it an “amazing thing to be on this planet,” said their daughter Maria.

Michael often wrote about the natural world, including a poem about the magnificent scenery on all of his cross-country road trips with Barbara.

“If one sees this, what need of other gods?” Michael wrote in a poem to Barbara in 2020. “For you have your protector, and faith in what befalls you: good or bad. You know your life does not end with you but runs on and on through these shifting gravels.”

In the last couple of years of his life, Michael had grown uncharacteristically nervous, Barbara noticed, as if he knew his time was almost up.

“All good things come to an end,” she said. “But I never could’ve imagined this.”